Thirteen Forty-Seven

Good year to have a job like monger, wear a cloak, be alopecic, strafe the heath in a bird mask lancing boils. Sometimes we get born tailed. We squirm loose gap-toothed with a neck mole tossing its locks in the wind, with a cloudy eye that leaks, in an epoch immune to our beauties. I’d have been radiant in a robe. My hair shirt would’ve hung just so. With a rosary of bones, with a brain full of Greek, drawing elegant Os in a fat tome’s margins. So it goes. Now it’s now—I’m told be well, be happy, like happy isn’t its own strict king called God. It is. It wasn’t always so: with some plague for perspective, a damn-serious dusk; A rat to share your dinner with; A flea. Each night the sun snuffed out—a torch. It boiled a far-off sea.